[Ger-Poland-Volhynia] Deportations

[Michael & Maureen McHenry]

That certainly sums up what happened. Interestingly in going over 1939
German census of Poland recently there were 350,000 Germans in middle
Poland. A lot like Linda's woman must have returned.

                                 Mike 

-----Original Message-----
From: ger-poland-volhynia-bounces at eclipse.sggee.org
[mailto:ger-poland-volhynia-bounces at eclipse.sggee.org] On Behalf Of
Richard Benert
Sent: Saturday, July 10, 2004 12:44 PM
To: Michael & Maureen McHenry; ger-poland-volhynia at eclipse.sggee.org
Subject: Re: [Ger-Poland-Volhynia] Deportations

> There is a lot being said about Volhynia. Does anyone know what
happened
> in middle Poland and the villages near Warsaw? This saw major battles
> early in the war.
>
>                                  Mike

Yes, we've been ignoring Poland.  Here's what I find about it in Eric
Lohr's PhD
thesis, "Enemy Alien Politics Within the Russian Empire During World War
I"
(which is in the SGGEE library, if anyone is interested).  This was
published as
a book by Harvard U Press in 2003, entitled, "Nationalizing the Russian
Empire.
The Campaign Against Enemy Aliens During World War I".

Apparently the first military commander to start deporting German
colonists
(hereafter GC) from areas where troops were present was active in the
Suwalki
Province in northeastern Poland.  He gave orders to this effect in
September,
1914.  On October 10, one General Sivers, commander of the 10th Army ( I
have no
idea what area the 10th Army covered) ordered GC deported from his
military
district.  On November 30, a General Ruszkii ordered GC deported from
the entire
Suwalki Province.  I'm guessing that this attention to GC in northeast
Poland
was due to the German advance along its northern front towards the
Baltics in
these months.

As for the rest of Poland, the authorities were suspicious of GC from
the start
of the war, and memos were sent from the top down to keep an eye on
these
potential spies.  (And at the same time, eyes were kept on Jews, whose
Yiddish
sounded so much like German to Russian troops that the two groups were
more or
less identified with each other as unreliable.  Jews began to be
expelled en
masse as early as September also).  Whether all this concern with spying
led to
deportations of individual Germans during August and September I'm not
sure, but
in October, Chief of Staff Ianushkevich ordered that all enemy subjects
without
exception be removed from areas near the war front (meaning German and
Austrian
citizens--not Russian citizens).  On December 13, 1914, Gen. Danilov (I
think)
ordered their removal from all of Poland.  Ten days later, Danilov
ordered the
removal of all male GC (Russian subjects included) from the left bank of
the
Vistula (towards the west).  On Christmas day, Danilov ordered that all
GC over
the age of 15, whether male or female, be deported if they lived within
16 km of
a railroad.  The next day, Ianushkevich reported that Germans has been
seen
sending signals to the German army.  If any were caught at it, they
should be
hanged.  Otherwise, all GC should be expelled from the entire Vistula
region.
The Polish Governor General estimated that this would involve about
200,000
people.  It may be worth noting here that the German armies by the end
of 1914
had come to only within 50 miles or so of Warsaw.  The Russian generals
were
thinking ahead, bless their souls.

At first it was unclear as to who exactly should be deported.  The main
target
was males over 15, but families were "encouraged" to go along.  (I
suppose that,
in the case of the females living close to a railroad, the kids would
have
little choice.)  Such ambiguity led to all sorts of irregularities in
deciding
who might be exempted and who couldn't. Some governors apparently
deported
everyone without exception; others only males over 15.  This led to the
Polish
Governor General (Engalychev) getting the top military brass together in
January, 1915, to regularize the process.  "For my part," he wrote, "I
consider
it urgently necessary to take the most severe measures of war with
Germanism
through the deportation of the greatest possible number of German
colonists,
regardless of their age or sex".  As you might expect, the conference
opted for
a wide dragnet, although it seemed to exclude Russian-subject Germans
who lived
in cities, dwelling instead on those who owned land or worked in rural
areas.
(I'll never understand this preoccupation with farmers, asif they were
more
likely to be spies than city-dwellers!)  Since women were as capable of
spying
as men, they were to be expelled also.  They were given 3 days to leave
Poland
for areas outside the war zone, with a travel document indicating their
destination.  If they failed to do this, they would be deported under
guard.  On
February 11, Engalychev ordered the carrying out of these decisions
throughout
Poland, setting the deadline of February 20, and actually including any
GC who
might live in towns.  In practice, Lohr says, non-colonist Germans in
towns were
often deported also.

I may as well close with a quote from Lohr:  "Evidence from deported
Germans'
correspondence and petitions indicates that army expulsions and
deportations
were sometimes violent, combined with looting of the colonists'
property,
although not on a scale comparable to the wave of army pogroms and
deportations
in Jewish settlements witnessed during the retreat.  Concerns about
looting and
uncontrolled occupation of German lands by local populations led the
January
1915 conference on colonist deportations to rule that their lands should
be
transferred to the local organs of the Ministry of State Properties and
the
Peasant Bank and guarded by local police.  The conference ruled that all
their
lands should be sequestered by the state for later redistribution."

I hope this begins to answer your question, Mike.  It's a pretty general
answer,
and we'd love to know about individual cases.  So I hope that if anyone
knows
about any, they'll chime in

There's an article in Russian that deals with both the Polish Germans
and
Volhynian German refugees in the Provinces of Samara and Saratov in
1915-17.
I've got a rough translation of it, but it's so rough that I hate to say
anything about it.  Apparently the two groups received somewhat
different
treatment there, but I'm just not sure what to make of it.  Are there
any
Russian-readers out there who'd like to have a go at it?

Dick Benert

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